


Nor Iron Bars a Cage

by circ_bamboo



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Community: where_no_woman, Gen, Mother's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-15
Updated: 2011-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-19 11:39:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/circ_bamboo/pseuds/circ_bamboo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the <a href="http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/"><b>where_no_woman</b></a> Mother's Day fest. The crew is the <em>Yorktown</em> while Pike is captain. Lrrr is Head Nurse under Boyce. She isn't human. Title blatantly ripped off from Wordsworth.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Nor Iron Bars a Cage

**Author's Note:**

> For the [](http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/profile)[**where_no_woman**](http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/) Mother's Day fest. The crew is the _Yorktown_ while Pike is captain. Lrrr is Head Nurse under Boyce. She isn't human. Title blatantly ripped off from Wordsworth.

"Sickbay to Nurse Lrrr."

Chhssracllth Esssthtrlrrr, Starfleet Lieutenant, Head Nurse on the U.S.S. _Yorktown_ , and the only Esschthass in the 'fleet, reached up and touched the plate above her bed to turn on the heat lamp. She kept her room warm, and she wasn't _actually_ quite cold-blooded, but it was very hard to wake up from a sound sleep without a little extra warmth. "Lrrr here," she said, groggy but hopefully intelligible.

"I need you to meet me down by the brig, Nurse," Dr. Boyce's voice said over the comm.

"I'll be there as ssssoon as I can," Lrrr said, and bit her tongue, just behind the fork. She hated it, _hated_ it, when she slipped. In addition to the fact that she'd worked so hard on training herself not to hiss when speaking Standard, it made humans uncomfortable. Frightened, even. And she did not, had never liked the taste/scent of frightened human.

"Sounds good. Boyce out."

Lrrr stood slowly, stretching out to her full over-two-meters height, stretching webbed hands up to the ceiling. She scratched at the reddish scales at her neck, the ones that contrasted with the rest of the brownish-gray, and grabbed a blue skirted uniform from her dresser. She'd never liked the way that the uniform pants fit over her tail.

Pulling the uniform over her head, she stepped into her boots, chewed a synthesized tablet of what the Esschthass had chewed for generations the way humans used toothpaste, and blinked two sets of eyelids at the mirror. Her head still felt like she was swimming through ssithss--Dr. Boyce had told her once that the Standard equivalent, at least in the simile, was 'molasses'--but she couldn't delay any longer. Besides, the walk over to the brig would probably wake her up some more.

It did, despite the cooler air in the hallway. She reached her destination a few minutes later, and saw Dr. Boyce, Commander One, and one of the other nurses standing in front one of the cells. She came up behind them, and they turned.

"Ah, Nurse Lrrr," Dr. Boyce said. "We need your expertise." He gestured to the occupant of the cell.

It appeared to be . . . well, zie looked nothing like Lrrr, but zie was arguably also what humans called "reptilian." There was about as much resemblance as there was between a human and a Klingon--that is, none that either would be willing to acknowledge. Xer scales were much finer, xer neck ridges were flared out, and zie had bright green skin and six limbs, four of which were chained to the wall, holding xer upright. The other two, apparently an extra set of arms, were wrapped around xer body, about in the middle. "I have no idea what zie is, sir," Lrrr said.

"He can spit venom," Nurse Wyschak said, right as zie hissed and spit something at the force field. It flickered.

 _So can I_ , Lrrr thought, but didn't say it out loud, as she wasn't entirely sure that anyone knew other than Dr. Boyce. "Did you get tricorder readings?"

"Yes, but they don't make sense to me," Dr. Boyce said, holding out the device. "My specialty isn't in xeno. Yours is," he added, with the half-smile that meant that he was making a joke. Commander One smiled as well.

Lrrr nodded--she had no idea what was supposed to be funny about his statement but had found that nods were usually safe--took the tricorder, and scanned through the data. _Hm. Interesting_ , she thought.

And then, _Interesting._

She did some rapid calculations in her head and translated that into a mask over the data, recalculating. _Oh_ , she thought. _Oh._ Looking up, her second set of eyelids flickered over her eyes in agitation. Nurse Wyschak winced, but Lrrr couldn't bring herself to care. "Get her out of those shacklesss now," she said, not even noticing the hiss.

"Excuse me?" Commander One said, voice deceptively quiet.

"She'ssss pregnant," Lrrr said. And now that she knew, she could see the swelling of the captive's midsection, scales looking a little stretched.

To their credit, the humans' eyes widened in what she recognized as surprise and shock, and Commander One started pressing buttons on the wall panel right away.

"We didn't know," Dr. Boyce said, his eyes wide. "Oh, my God."

The shackles released the pregnant alien only a few moments after Lrrr's request, and zie--she--slumped to the floor and hissed again, saying something in what was clearly a language but one that didn't bear any resemblance to anything Lrrr spoke.

Well, the fact that it was clearly nothing like Esschthassian was obvious to Lrrr. Dr. Boyce and Nurse Wyschak turned inquiring looks on her, and she shook her head. "If I don't recognize her species, what makes you think I could recognize her language?" she asked, and belatedly added, "Sir."

"You have a point," the commander said, and Lrrr twitched her tail minutely in relief.

"What do we do with her?" Dr. Boyce asked.

"I'm sure there are protocols for dealing with pregnant captives," Lrrr said. "I'm not certain, but I believe she's only a day or so from laying her clutch."

"That soon?" Nurse Wyschak asked, and Lrrr nodded.

"I'll check," Commander One said, and disappeared down the brig hallway.

"Where did we find her?" Lrrr asked.

"She spit venom at Lieutenant Patil on Saven Beta IV," Dr. Boyce said. "And then she threw herself on him and got transported up. Donhowe's fixing Patil up now."

"Can't we just put her back, sir?"

"She wasn't a native of the planet, either," Commander One said, returning. "As a matter of fact, we still don't know where she's from. And no," she added, "the relevant protocols are not helpful in this situation." The first officer sounded slightly annoyed, Lrrr thought, although she wasn't certain. Human vocal inflections were more confusing than facial expressions.

However, Commander One's words lit a spark in Lrrr's brain. "I may be able to help with that," she said, tapping the tricorder. She sent a burst of information to a screen on the wall, including most of the compounds apparently found in the pregnant captive's blood, although she wasn't sure how Dr. Boyce had gotten a sample.

Commander One's head tipped to one side. "I see," she said, and set the computer to scan.

Five minutes later, they'd found four likely planets nearby, based on the similarities between the captive's blood and the makeup of the planets. Dr. Boyce and Nurse Wyschak left to return to Sickbay, and Commander One to update Captain Pike.

Lrrr stayed with the captive, who had subsided into occasional low hisses, all four of her upper limbs wrapped around her midsection. " _I don't know who you are_ ," Lrrr said in her own language, " _but I am very sorry that we would capture you and constrain you during this time_."

The captive sat straight up and said something, again unintelligible.

" _We'll be returning you to your home as soon as we can_." Lrrr lengthened her trills and hisses; it made her sound more soothing to herself, and she assumed it was the same in the captive's language.

It may have been; the captive replied also with lengthened hisses and trills, although still nothing Lrrr recognized.

They kept up the conversation, as it were, until Commander One called down, speaking more quickly and with more variance in her tone than usual. Lrrr thought that meant she was excited, but wasn't sure. "We've found the planet. We'll be transporting the captive down momentarily."

"You found others of her kind?"

"As far as we can tell," Commander One said. "Mister Spock thinks that we have found a group with similar markings."

"Oh. Thank you, sir," Lrrr said, feeling at once relieved and disappointed.

"You're welcome, Nurse Lrrr. And thank you for your help."

"You're welcome, sir."

Lrrr stood, and moved as close to the force field as she could, but slowly, as not to spook the captive. She held up one hand, about an inch from the force field, and said, " _You'll be leaving us soon, sister. Pleasant travels_."

The captive raised her own hand, one of the top pair, silently, and disappeared in a show of glitter a moment later.

Lrrr stared at the force field for another long moment, and then left the brig.


End file.
